The Recent Brazilian Disinflation Process and Costs

Abstract

This work revisits the recent disinflation process in Brazil and finds that solely the agents' perception that a policy rupture could occur is capable of triggering a change in the way firms and households used to behave in their pricing and consuming decisions. This change was captured by structural breaks in the parameters of a generalized hybrid Phillips curve, following the 2002 inflation shock. The paper also shows that such parameter changes led to an increase in the disinflation cost evidenced by a free market inflation gain that would have been observed should the coefficients on the Phillips curve have not changed. The paper finds that, maintaining the occurred paths for interest rates, output gap, nominal exchange rates, administered price inflation and exogenous shocks, the free market inflation would have been significantly lower in the absence of such structural break in the underlying inflation process, since mid 2002.